The typical priest is married to the church, so devoted to their religion and beliefs and convictions, and has no family except the family of himself with the Lord. For a priest to have a relationship outside of the church is not only frowned upon, but forbidden. The irony in the novel The Power and the Glory is so strong that this priest—one with no recognized name symbolizing nothingness—is an alcoholic attempting to feel nothing in his life who breaks the regulation a priest should have by having a short association with a woman named Maria. The outcome of this wasn’t just failure for the priest to obey rules, but along with their relationship arrived a baby. Due to the conspicuous fact that this was wrong behavior for a priest, the priest left Maria alone with a baby to raise on her own.
Years later, the priest encountered his daughter and Maria to find his daughter, Brigida , had no value to her life. Children should obtain innocence, however, Brigida ironically seemed so stoic and adult like. She doesn’t get along with other children because she grew up so quickly and her family wasn’t traditional with a mother and a father. With her dark, twisted personality, you wouldn’t expect her to save her father from being caught by the police and being arrested, yet she manages to accomplish that in this novel as well. The priest’s convictions, unfortunately, were not the same as Maria’s, leaving Brigida suffering from being an outcast, a nobody, nothing.
